Culture-shaped Mental Models and the Governance of Innovation in Tourist Destinations – Comparative Evidence from Ecuador and Azerbaijan

Abstract

Destinations in Developing Countries often display shortages when it comes to the creation and use of new innovative knowledge, thus inhibiting their possibilities to unfold the potential of tourism as a means for sustainable regional development. Findings from tourism research increasingly point to the nature of tourism stakeholders' mindsets as an inhibiting factor in this regard. However, empirical evidence is scarce on the complex structure and (culture -shaped) development -processes of those mental models that form the basis of these mindsets. This comparative study of two regional destinations in both Azerbaijian and Ecuador presents a new qualitative approach, based on the GABEK semantic modelling technique, where latent and manifest forms of collective mental models are uncovered together with the cultural “traces” left by their formation -process. As a main result, intervention areas for a targeted “cultural engineering” are identified on the basis of the extracted mental models that may serve as a starting point for a more systemic governance of innovation in DC -destinations